PUBLIC Red Chrome Ride-Along

[Evi "Dustoff" Ashford]

Red Room Club
Watson
11:17am

By the time she was supposed to go pick up Faust to scout out south Watson, Evi was already ready to be done with the day. Early that morning, she'd gone to see Greaves at his apartment and have a discussion about how the fuck he managed to miss multiple units of badge armor closing down the streets, when Eights had somehow managed to catch wind of it without even half of the access. All he'd done was make excuses, until the end there. Then he tried threatening her with his badge, talking about how difficult he could make life for her. She'd reminded him how difficult Risers would make being alive for him, and walked out the door without looking back.

The drive back to the Red Room Club was only a respite inasmuch as it took her farther away from the waste of space and laces that had occupied her day so far. Loose concrete crunched under the tires as she pulled into what passed for the parking lot, and then into her spot right next to the door. For just half a second she paused to take a breath, doing her best to work past that itch in her knuckles. As much as she wanted to, Greaves was one of the lucky few Lacers she couldn't put hands on. Not even after a fuck-up like that.

Her entrance into the club was unassuming, and generally so was her presence there - she'd long since adjusted to the following that both herself and Risers had, and mostly didn't mind it, so when a small group of shaved heads turned in her direction she returned the greeting with a smile. The kids could always be a real pain, sure, but it was nice to see the younger ones coming around more. They always became more frequent faces after getting laced, and she recognized a couple of them from one of the rallies a few months back. It was always nice when they showed initiative.

There was no need for her to ask where Faust was. There was only one place he would be, and she made her way to one of the back VIP rooms, inviting herself in once she saw it was mostly empty. The man she was looking for sat in one of the booths talking to who she thought she recognized as another one of the C.D.S, though his conversation partner brushed past her to leave as she stepped further into the room. Evi only glanced in that direction, then slid into the booth across from him.

"You draw the short stick, or do you actually want to spend your day driving around Watson?" It was a job she liked, but that was because it was the job she did - her own work for the Movement and what C.D.S did never usually directly intersected. Or at least, it wasn't often she was taking one of them on a ride along. "Car's out front, I'm ready whenever you are. Should be a quiet day."

Famous last words.

 

[Red Chrome Legion]

Faust kept his eyes on the horizon outside the window, praying to a god he didn't believe in that Evi's car would come screaming out from beyond it. With every passing minute he was disappointed, the horizon being blotted out by Four Guns' massive red-chromed biceps as he flexed them this way and that - his teeth clenched to a cigar like some fucking corp cartoon character. Faust didn't mind Four Guns in very small, very short doses. The man was a vet and had been apart of CDS even longer than himself, but the fucker was half-a-psycho and couldn't shut the fuck up to save his life.

"You gotta get yourself some real chrome choom" the roided out psycho grinned, all four of his chrome arms flexing in unison, "I used to think bio sculpting was the shit, but check these guns out man. I could pop the sun like a watermelon between these babies. What you packing anyway? The old gen 2s? Shit, choom, I coulda ripped them bitches off when I was packing boosted meat..."

blah, blah, blah someone please kill me, blah, blah fucking blah

Faust slammed his head into the table, like that would stop the man from yapping on and on - which of course it didn't. "For the love of Christ, God, Zeus, whatever fucking God might be up there, can we talk about something other than your chrome?"

"Can't hear you with your face in the table choom"

He only groaned. Then he heard the sweetest voice any man could hear in that moment - the voice of someone there to drag him away on something official.

"Thank fucking GOD!" he stood up as she sat down, putting a hand on Dust's shoulder and sliding her back out of the booth, "no, no I'm fucking ecstatic to be anywhere but here right now."

He did his best to coax Dust gently out of the VIP area, "quiet is exactly what I need right now."

 

[Evi "Dustoff" Ashford]

Just as soon as she caught a glimpse of who he'd been talking to, Evi understood the rush to leave. She glanced back as they exited into the club itself, then laughed and shook her head. "I don't know how that fucker hasn't been passed on to Maelstrom already." It probably had everything to do with him being C.D.S, and not much else. Like she'd told Risers, they needed the numbers, and veterans of the Movement were in short supply.

When they stepped outside and into the smoggy, neon haze she took a moment to light a cigarette, unlocking her car with just a thought. Thin wisps of smoke lingered as she slid into the driver's seat, and she reached over to pull the box of fliers down onto the floor before he sat down. "Figure I'll put a few of these up while we're out, got them printed last night." It'd been simple to design them, and she'd put one of the Boots in charge of getting them all off the press in time. All in all, her part of the process had taken an hour at most - the easiest part of putting this stomp together so far.

With the press of a button the engine roared to life, but she didn't back out right away. Evi leaned over to rummage in the glove box, closing it with the same hand she grabbed the bottle of pills with and taking two before letting the bottle fall into the cup holder. She felt him looking at her but waved it off as she shifted into reverse and backed out until she had just enough clearance, throwing it into drive and pulling onto the street. There was a second where she thought about explaining herself, but didn't. The bruises he could see were testament enough.

"Talked to Greaves this morning." Odds were he didn't care, but she needed to bitch to someone about it. "He's on thin fucking ice. I'm getting fucking tired of these kids getting a badge and forgetting about their laces." It wasn't as if the problem didn't have an equally simple solution. Badges were killed in the line of duty all the time, and nobody would miss one more added to the tally. All it would take was one word to the right person, but she'd been feeling charitable that morning, for however long it lasted.

Her next thought was interrupted by someone behind them laying on their horn, and she made sure they saw her middle finger when the shitty car they were driving tried hopping the curb to get around traffic. Evi sighed and breathed out smoke with it, cigarette perched carefully in the corner of her mouth. "Still a better day than the one you were having, looks like. The fuck did Four Guns want, anyway?"

 

[Red Chrome Legion]

Faust regarded the fliers with a polite glance and a disinterested hmmm. Art had never been his thing, he couldn't have given advice on so much as a macaroni picture - let alone something official. They looked fine by his eye, something that would have gotten him to check out the show in his youth, or at least would have if he hadn't wasted his entire adolescence in Militech's shitshow training program. "Think I saw some of the boots putting those up in Charter this morning, you trying to get the whole city to show out?" he wouldn't be surprised based on how tightly Riser's had the stick up his ass recently.

Faust was second on the totem-pole when it came to a lot of CDS plays, but he was just another low man when it came to anything bigger. From what he'd gathered, Harper himself wanted this show big and loud.

He let her go on about Greaves, chuckling under his breath as she bitched. Faust didn't hate the badges as much as Riser or Dust did. Maybe that was because he didn't grow up in the city. As far as he was concerned, an NCPD badge was just another sorry-bastard like him - tricked into fighting for a privately owned government agency because they bought into propaganda about saving some made up society. Sure, he recognized that they were the enemy and that meant they needed killing, but when R.C.L took the city they'd still need the cops. Who else was going to put down the uppity japs?

"The more laced badges the better" Faust said, "besides, we'll need them when Day Zero comes. Can't string up all the japs and CEOs with just CDS - and God knows we can't trust fucking Lacers to do the job. Not to mention most the badges are just as pissed as we are, just need to wake up from the slop is all. I'm confident we can teach pigs to fly."

He'd thought a lot about Day Zero recently - even reread some of the first R.C.L pamphlets he ever saw, the ones that opened his eyes to The Movement to begin with. Even back then he found it hard to believe that there could ever be a Day Zero, but all the books and papers talked about it like an eventuality. More than that, it was a prophecy. A day when "The Great Caesar" would finally take control of Night City and eradicate the old corruption in a single day. Twenty-four hours where the slums would wake up and realize their Justified Hatred and join the ranks of True Believers. They'd round up cultural poisons; corpo-rats, state deniers, japs - anyone who was a threat to the coming order and zero them. Hence the name.

Now though? It felt like every day The Movement inched closer and closer to that eventuality. "The same thing he always wants, to show off his fucking arms" he sighed, holding up his rifle as the shitty car tried popping around them. The driver of the shitmobile was some lady with a half-chromed face, her eyes narrowed and her finger raised - that was until she saw the barrel pointed at her through the window. The screech of the tires was sharp as she hit on the breaks, disappearing behind them as they continued on their way. Faust just laughed, taking note of how many people and bars there were around here.

"This would be a good place..." he said absently, his eyes clicking gently as he snapped photos of the area. A thorton rigged up with some big boom would do a lot of damage here, probably get a decent body count too.